


Wander With Me

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Domestic, Epistolary, Falling In Love, First Kiss, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Idiots in Love, M/M, Mythology - Freeform, Post-Canon, Post-Thick as Thieves, Relationship Negotiation, Religious Themes, Romance, Slow Burn, falling in love in spite of emotional baggage, pov: kamet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-17 00:33:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11840292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: I was walking home when I suddenly heard my own thoughts as clearly as though they were being whispered into my ear.How wonderful.I had just caught sight of my Attolian, leaning against the cairn where the road forked one way for the temple and one way for the village. He'd been on his way home when he realised that it was near my time and so turned back to wait for me that we might walk together.How wonderful. And how easy it could be to forget that life is anything more than this.





	Wander With Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plalligator](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plalligator/gifts).



> Title is from the first tablet of Immakuk and Ennikar: 
> 
> Asked Ennikar of Immakuk what have you learned?  
> Learned about welcome and unwelcome said Immakuk  
> Wise Immakuk asked Proud Ennikar what he had learned  
> Learned I like to wander said Ennikar  
> Wander with me then friend Immakuk of friend Ennikar asked  
> together they went seeking the day of their return to Immakuk’s city
> 
> Boundless thanks are due to [florianschild](http://archiveofourown.org/users/florianschild/pseuds/florianschild) whose time and care were invaluable over several drafts of this story. It was a pleasure to work with you, thank you.
> 
> And thanks of course to pendrecarc for making this exchange happen again!
> 
> And finally to plalligator for the prompts. I truly hope that you enjoy this story as much as I enjoyed working on it.

 

 

> Aris,
> 
> Thanks to my friend the scribe, there are pens and papers in my house in such abundance I feel as though I fell asleep one night and woke up in the morning a king. Although I suppose a king would have a larger house. It's nothing unusual for this village, I'm not complaining, but I am used to either a single small sleeping room with an entire palace beyond its curtain or else a farmhouse with its various purposeful rooms and the wide spaces of fields and pastures beyond. My friend would call me a fool if I confessed  this to him, but on all our long journey here I did not give much thought to what life would be like after we arrived here. I am grateful indeed that other scholars and their families have been arriving in the village for the same purpose as we did. I would not wish to be the single pebble cast into this formerly still pool.
> 
> How are you, Aris? And the captain? Can you tell me any news of the health and happiness of our other  friends? Gods all around us, it is strange to be so far from home. You will tell me that I should be used to it by now, but in all that time I was always coming home. Now I am not. I am standing still and I am safe and comfortable. I know why I am here, but there are days that I feel a great weight of guilt on my shoulders.
> 
> I should not have complained of our house as I did. Let me give you a better picture: the cook stove is marvellous, and because my friend is at the temple all day I have learnt to use it if I don't wish to eat cold supper every night. Our house is just below the crest of one of the hills, and the front door opens to the west. We leave it open in the evenings for an uninterrupted view towards the coast as the light of the sunset pours into the room. You remember what we used to speak about on campaign, enumerating the things that make the world worth living in? Sunset on a seaside cliff, I've decided. Should battle reach me again, this is the picture I shall carry in my heart.
> 
> So, so, so. The kitchen is serviceable and the view like one of the murals in the royal gallery. The bedroom is small and only separated from the main room with a curtain, with another curtain that can be drawn between the beds. The beds are equally comfortable, I know this because I lay down in Kay's while he was out in order to assure myself, but one is larger and that one is mine. When we arrived we were very tired and irritable, fresh off another one of our arguments, and he chose that one before I could say anything.
> 
> I regret that we did not have more time to talk while I was home. There is much I would have told you that seems inconsequential now, from such a distance.
> 
> I will say this and then no more about it: What my friend does not understand, what I begin to fear he will never understand, is how deeply it pains me to see reminders of the time when we were acting the part of servant and master. The issue of the beds is such a trivial matter. The house was previously occupied by a family with only one child and we inherited their furniture, that is all. But on the days when he happens to leave his side of the curtain askew and I am reminded of it, I am filled with the resolve to go into the village and gather supplies to make him a new one. I am confounded in my resolve by my utter lack of carpentry skills, and I can't ask for help because the villagers seem to have gotten a certain idea about the two of us and it's been long enough now that to refute it would only draw the kind of attention that we managed to avoid upon arrival.
> 
> It is probably for the best, though, whatever the villagers are thinking, as I am not sure what other possible reason I could have to be here, if I were not the scribe's companion. There is a farm where I have been making myself useful now that we are in the season. It is in a nearby fertile valley, an hour's downhill walk from here and twice that to come back home when I'm tired, but they do not need me every day and I am left with ample time to indulge in my hobbies. The surrounding landscape has grown quite familiar to me already. The views down to the sea are breath-taking and the sparse wildlife and plants of the highest points hold my special interest. My friend is in correspondence with a scholar who once spent time cataloguing the natural life in the mountains of Eddis, and he has promised to send a copy of his work in hopes that I might put it to use noting similarities and differences.
> 
> Thank the gods for this odd turn of events that has made my way clear for me and revealed my true calling as a naturalist.
> 
> You are laughing at me, Aris, I know you are. You must write to me soon to report on how idiotic I have made myself out to be. Look, I have even sent you a blank sheet of paper so that you need not stoop so low as to beg one from Priam. Wait to send it with the bonded messenger who will leave next month so you won't have to watch your words as I have here.
> 
> Be well, my friend.
> 
> Costis

 

  

 

 

> My thanks for your letter, Magus, and the accompanying documents. I have taken only a cursory glance over each as I wish to return this note and the promised scroll to you by the same ship before she leaves at high tide.
> 
> We continue to settle in here, finding our feet and our place among the scholars and labourers. The house is small. Every house in the village is small. Our new home is rugged and windswept and has only one thing in great abundance: rocks. There is a kind of elegance, rustic elegance, if such a thing exists, to the style of the village. The rocks from which each house is built are a slightly different colour to the one next to it. I believe that the founders went to some length to see it so.  My chatty friend reveals new hobbies every day; he has quite the interest in design and construction, it seems, and makes himself acquainted with the insides of our neighbours' houses. Friendships that shall prove useful indeed should we ever run out of flour and need to borrow.
> 
> Kay
> 
> Costis bids me add his thanks for the book and a wish that you will be successful in all your endeavours.

 

\---

 

"That's wrong," Costis said, pointing over my shoulder.

"And you suddenly write Mede as well as you speak it?" I asked, sprinkling sand across the wet ink.

Costis shook his head, staying my hand. "I know that word, my king once spent an hour debating it with his tutor."

Of course he did. "To what conclusion?"

"To the conclusion that one might be _blessed_ —" he said in Attolian, "without, by any objective measure, _succeeding_ ," here he used the Mede word, mispronouncing it as usual.

"And so?"

"So, nothing. You've written it wrong."

"You would prefer to write my correspondence?" I asked, offering the quill.

I could see that he would, but Costis had never met Sounis's magus, and he would have sooner bent his knee to Nahuseresh than take such a liberty. So I dipped my pen once more and added neatly, 'I have heard stories that our mutual friend used to make Costis sit through his lessons on the Mede language, which now entitles Costis to lecture me on the difference between a _success_ and a _blessing._ '

 

"Why that greeting?" I asked Costis later in the day.

"Why do you write to the magus in Mede?" He replied.

"He wishes to improve his skill with the language."

"I thought the magus spoke every language on earth?" Costis raised his eyebrows, but continued without a pause. "It seems to me that Kay the Scribe becomes more recognizable as Kamet the Secretary if he is writing and speaking in Mede."

I shut my mouth without speaking as he turned away. He was not wrong, and yet I had taken it upon myself to check _his_ correspondence before sending the bundle of letters away in the morning.

"Why that greeting?" I asked again.

"Which?" My stubborn Attolian asked, occupied with counting the leaves of some new plant he'd tripped over, the field guide from the Magus open in one hand.

We had travelled all afternoon to reach the most distant of his observation points, and had satisfied ourselves – he with a glass, me with my trust in his keen eyes – that there were no ships in sight.

Since I had made the mistake of telling Costis what Jeffa had told me regarding sunshine and the preservation of eyesight, I have found myself dragged along on these daily outings. At first he would insist on placing the spyglass into my hand and asking me to confirm what he saw, but it is unwieldy to hold the thing against my eye with my eye-glasses on, and pointless with them off. The eye-glasses had been a parting gift from Eugenides, probably to aid in his misdirection that it was _my_ eyes that he was sending to Roa.

"The blessing that does not guarantee success," I pressed him. "I've never heard it before."

"We don’t use it in Attolia." Costis's shoulders rose and then fell. "My king tells a story of a time he travelled with the Magus, but the Magus didn't know who he was."

"Ennikar in trouble with a maid, again," I murmured, and Costis laughed, lifting a hand in acknowledgment.

"So. One of their travelling companions began to suspect the king after he thanked him using those words."

I wondered if Costis had been trying to send the magus a message, even if only a reminder of the long reach of our 'mutual friend,' and if he was even aware of doing so.

"Who was the king pretending to be?"

"A thief from Eddis." Costis grinned.

I laughed. "He cloaks himself in his truths."

Costis nodded. "They are the only thing about him more ridiculous than his lies."

 _How lovely laughter sounds in the free air_ , I wrote that night in my private journal. _I'd never noticed before._

 

A summer storm surged along the coast. Winds, hell-bent on outpacing the fleetest messengers of the gods, swept up into Roa, pummelling our little village. The priests in the temple had warned me to expect the violent gales but when the door crashed open in the middle of the night, all that I could see in the wild moment when I was still weighted down with sleep was a flood of Namreen pouring into our house. I cried out, "Costis!" as I rolled out of bed and reached for the sword that he had been training me to use.

"It's all right." His voice came from the other side of the curtain, and a light bloomed into being. "It did not break, I've secured the bolt again." Costis drew the curtain, and I could see by the light of his lamp that he was wet through. "Kamet?" he said, carefully. "Are you all right?"

I dropped the point of the sword, pushing myself to my feet. I could feel that I was shaking. "What was that, Costis?"

"The wind." Costis put the lamp down and took one step into my sleeping area. "The storm. It's been raging all night, didn't you hear it? A gust finally blew the door in but I've got it closed again, nothing is damaged."

"Monsters of hell," I breathed, putting the sword down altogether and dropping to sit on my bed, holding my head in my hands.

Beneath the noise of the storm I could hear the sound of Costis moving about, opening drawers and, presumably, putting on a dry nightshirt. I didn't look up again until Costis's bed frame creaked gently. He had parted the curtain between our beds and was sitting directly across from me with his back propped against the wall and his feet stretched out in front of him, watching me. We'd kept the curtain drawn since the day we moved in, and I realised that I had somehow managed to convince myself that a much larger space separated the two corners where we slept.

"You were afraid that we were under attack?" Costis asked, resettling more comfortably with his arms folded across his chest. When I nodded, he lifted his eyebrows. "Still?"

I looked away. I wanted to laugh so that I would not cry. _Still_ , of course. _Always_ , Godekker had said.

"Is it Nahuseresh," Costis asked, and I found him studying his boots, his expression strangely familiar. "Or the greater workings of the empire?"

I opened my mouth to tell him, _Both_ , and then began to reconsider. My former master was in self-appointed exile. Eugenides had told me that he'd sold off his possessions before making the move and I was in a better position than most to understand what that meant. Assassins work for honour or money, and Nahuseresh had none of the former and not nearly enough of the latter to justify spending half of it on eliminating me. But then again, in a world where a great king would boast before his assembled court that he had stolen from his bitterest enemy out of spite, what might not that bitter enemy do to even the score?

Costis was still waiting for his answer, so I gave it to him. "I do not believe that my former master has the resources at present to dedicate to either my retrieval, or my silence."

This startled Costis. I could tell that he had been aiming to reassure me by pointing out that we could not possibly have been followed, that no one could discover us here, and that even if they did I had him to protect me.

"You say it's been storming all night?" I asked quickly. "I didn't hear it 'til now."

"It has," Costis said, uncrossing his arms to crane his neck, looking out of our curtained alcove toward the door. "It began shortly after you began snoring."

"I don't snore!" I protested.

"You never used to," Costis said, perfectly sincere. "I wonder if it's the altitude?"

I stared at him in quiet horror. Had I been disrupting his sleep all this while?

"Nahuseresh would not have tolerated a slave who snored?" Costis said after a moment, reading my mind.

"Never," I agreed, my voice faint and my thoughts far away. It was all too much to take in while I was still sleep-addled. And I was, truly; for the first time in my memory, I was sleeping in, sleeping late, sometimes rising from my bed feeling fogged and then spending the warm afternoons anticipating dropping into it again. It was nothing against my work or my life here, but it was as though, up in these rugged hills, I was learning for the first time in all my life what it really meant to sleep, to rest.

What had I been thinking about earlier in the day? I rubbed my eyes and tried to remember. I had been walking home and suddenly heard my own thoughts as clearly as though they were being whispered into my ear. _How wonderful,_ my own voice had said. I had just caught sight of my Attolian, leaning against the cairn where the road forked one way for the temple and one way for the village. He'd been to the baker's and was carrying a sweet-smelling loaf and speaking about supper. Between his sentences, I gleaned that he'd been on his way home when he realised that it was near my time and so turned back to wait for me that we might walk together.

_How wonderful. And how easy it could be to forget that life is anything more than this._

I found myself quite distracted for the remainder of the evening. I remember Costis laughing at me but do not remember why, and I went to bed without ever mentioning what the priests had told me about the storms, may the gods bless him for taking it all in his stride.

"Did you love him?"

"What?" My head came up so suddenly that I smacked it against the wall. Wincing, I tried to focus again on Costis.

"Nahuseresh. Did you…" His eyes fell away from mine, and he rubbed his palm over his left knee. "My king said, he told me, when he was telling me about you and about what my task would be in retrieving you, he said…he told me that the relationship between a Mede master and his high-class slave is often…complicated."

"Complicated?" I asked, laughing though I was unamused. "Is that the word he used?"

More often than not in these days I find myself thinking, and even dreaming, in Attolian. But there are still times I get caught up in the translation of a word, in this case musing on the web of relationships between their words for _complicate_ , _entangle, ensnare, inveigle_. In that moment, in the wavering dark that felt like the eye of a storm, I was almost ready to believe that the queen of Attolia's errand boy had foreseen all that I would come to understand through the process of translating the stories of Immakuk and Ennikar into his language.

"You did love him, then?" Costis, my beloved, stubborn Attolian, could put to shame any dog with a bone.

"Why do you ask? And do not say it was your king who put the idea into your head. Your king, I have found, understands me on the foundation of a few conversations in a way I do not even understand myself."

"Ha. If he had a hennat…"

"He'd make the gods of his fathers very rich with his offerings."

"Why did you not come with me, then? While you thought he was alive, I understand…I mean, I do not _understand_ , but I understand," Costis said, using three different words that I might have translated all as 'understand' had I seen them in different points in a text. "But after you spoke to Laela…"

"Your king leaves very little to chance."

"Closer to nothing."

"Mm." The matter of the wine merchant again. Immakuk, as Costis liked to call him after reading my account of our meeting. "He gambled much on the hope that I would follow someone I did not know back to a country I did not like, rather than attempt to make my own way out of an empire I know very well."

"Can you call it gambling when the player is backed by the gods?"

A great roll of thunder seemed to shake our very bones, and in another moment a gust of wind tore through the house, extinguishing the lamp.

"Well," Costis said in the dark. "That is one question answered."

I could not help myself; I laughed.

 

The summer storms raged on for two more days. They woke us again each night, and again we passed the time seated in our beds and speaking about whatever came to mind. Costis did not ask me about Nahuseresh again, for which I was grateful. It had made me uncomfortable that he would ask such a question; not because of the question, which was perfectly reasonable, but because I did not know how to answer him.

In the middle of the third night I asked him if he was familiar with the poet Melinno. He was, and I was almost unsurprised. As time has helped me to reconcile the pictures I carry of both King and Errand Boy, the fact that the son of a farmer was literate, that he had had a tutor in his youth and that tutor had impressed upon him some knowledge of the great poets, no longer seemed so incredible to me.

"Melinno has a lyric that tells of the poor woman's offering, do you know it? It is a retelling of one of the sacred stories of the Setran temples. I have known it all my life, but always thought it was silly."

"Isn't it about marking the difference between piety and devotion?" Costis asked, and I tipped my head from side to side, equivocating.

"Melinno does slant it that way, yes, but the story as I know it from childhood is a testimony to the joy of giving, of surrendering yourself wholly into your god's hands. What I used to find laughable was the way in which the poor widow who privately dedicates her very last coin is contrasted with the rich devotees who make large dedications with great public ceremony. If you have nothing, I thought, it would of course be easy to give it away and give yourself over entirely to the care of your god. What other possible option is there for one so destitute?"

"That does not seem silly to me," Costis said in a low voice, when I did not immediately continue.

I ducked my head, embarrassed. I reached to my bedside table for my eye-glasses, fiddling with them for a moment without putting them on. "What I could not take seriously was the picture of these wealthy men who were painted as such fools for behaving, as you say, with piety but without devotion. Dedicating their large sums so ostentatiously. When a person is that rich, or that powerful, he does not dedicate coins on an altar out of devotion to a god. It has nothing to do with any god; it is, always, a matter of political or social manoeuvring. When a man has both money and power, he does not need to cast himself upon his god's favour. He takes care of himself."

"Kamet," Costis murmured in a moment. I put my glasses on and looked up at him. Even in the dark I could see his eyes, wide and fixed on me. "That is…"

"Staggeringly arrogant?" I supplied, and he nodded.

Lightning cast strange shadows between us, and I resettled myself on my bed, staring into the dark corner, trying to see into the past. I have admitted to Costis before that he was right and I wrong about something. This felt different. This was bringing into the light an entire way of life, a philosophy, one that had served and preserved me for the majority of my life, and calling it wrong.

I tapped my lips, the gesture feeling weighty as it never had before, and spoke at last. "You asked why I would not have come to the docks that day if our old friend had not lead me to you. On that day, I had become the destitute widow, but I was still behaving as I had all my life. I was behaving like…"

"A wealthy fool?"

I looked up. He was smiling at me, and my heart lifted. "So, so, so."

 

I have never loved before. I have never been free to. My boyish infatuation with Marin was the final gasp of my aborted childhood, a mistake I did not repeat for the remainder of my time with Nahuseresh.

And so I cannot say with any certainty when it was that the sight of my Attolian began to occasion a quiver in my stomach that has little to do with the fact that his cooking is excellent when he has something better to work with than caggi. But when I think back over our journey together and remember certain instances, I can see that it may have been longer than I had any awareness of.

The storms caused extensive damage at the farm where Costis has been working. Usually when he goes there he spends the day and then returns just before dark, but the day after the winds abated he went and did not return that evening as he should have. Possibly not since sleeping with a lion over my head have I passed such a terrifying night. Of course it has transpired that he only stayed to help the distraught farmer – the roof of his barn had collapsed, killing his plough horse – but in the night and day of his unaccounted absence I lived through his death half a hundred times. The Namreen, or a mudslide, or an opportunistic bandit, or a broken leg after a fall. Odd, though, that it was not fear for myself that stopped my throat, but fear of the grief that was all I could see in my future. I could barely make myself go out and look for him, for fear of confirming which horror it was that kept him away.

"Kamet," Costis said later that night, quietly beseeching. I was sitting with my back to him at the little table that serves as my writing desk, and he at our supper table. I hadn't joined him for his meal. "Kamet, I am sorry."

I am still uncomfortable when he apologizes to me.

I stared down at the paper in front of me, not seeing the words I had just written but recalling instead a passage from months earlier.

  

> Not content with a spoken version, Relius wanted a written record of my flight from the empire, so I began this narrative in the palace of Attolia but have only recently neared its completion. The matter of what to leave in and what to leave out of my official telling has been an evolving one. My friend has an indefatigable devotion to the truth which has rather won out. My friend is also, however, as he seems determined to prove as often as he can, a fool.

 

It was taking out and rewriting that entire page, omitting only the mention of Costis, that started me on the thought of keeping a personal account of my days.

I know very well how dangerous it can be to commit private words to paper, especially without any benefit of distance between the events and the writing. How often had Nahuseresh dictated a letter in a fit of passion only to have me burn it in the morning when he thought better of his haste? I know how to burn a scroll so that the ash is unrecognizable and I know better than to burden my pen with the ink for anything but foolish, inconsequential thoughts; thoughts that might otherwise be forgotten in a day or two. Nothing that would bring either help or harm to anyone who comes upon it by chance or by force.

 

> How easy to forget everything but that I am a scholar, that he is a farmer, that we spend our days in our various pursuits and at night we come home to each other. How easy, and how dangerous.
> 
> Setting out to search for Costis, our house was barely out of sight when I came upon him at a bend in the road, as though this were any other day and not the day following a night wherein I nearly drove myself mad. He smiled when he saw me and I wanted to strike him for being so casually alive. I shouted at him instead.
> 
> Oh, my friend. It is not your fault that I am the idiot who has imprinted upon the first real friend he has ever had like a wayward duckling. But even as I write this I can feel an anger swell in me, much as it did back at the miller's dry well when he revealed himself to be very much alive.

 

"I never took you for a fishwife, Kamet." Costis spoke as though he was reading the thoughts that had poured out of me onto the page. "I don’t think it suits you."

I stood abruptly and walked over to him. He did not rise, only tipped his head up to look at me. His bright eyes were shining but sincere; he was amused, but he had meant the apology honestly. I touched his shoulder, and then lifted my hand to cup his cheek. His skin was warm. Several day's growth of his beard scratched my palm. The feel of him, and the way his lips parted at my touch, served at last to convince my poor rabbiting heart that all was well and he was here with me.

"You are very dear to me, Costis," I told him quietly, and my voice did not shake. "I do not like thinking of you lying dead either at the bottom of a well or the base of a mountain."

His hands are large, his fingers rough with callouses, but I do not believe I had ever felt anything so gentle as when he brushed them against my wrist.

"May I alleviate that one fear, at least?" He sounded at once both gruff and tender. "When I swore to my king that I would serve him, he told me that his god would keep me safe from falls."

It is not so simple, alas, to forget that I am more than just a scholar, that he is more than just a farmer. I straightened, and let my hand fall to my side. He spread his hands palm-down on the table in front of him, as though steadying himself. I went to my bed.

 

In the morning, I stood outside the front door looking south and west toward the Ellid sea. The sky was only just paling, and I could not see very far. Costis would be going out in that direction today, I knew. I wondered if he would ask me to come with him. Thanks to the storm and his overnight stay at the farm he had not made it to any of his further observation points in several days. I'd lain in bed thinking about it, about how _that_ ought to have been the first accusation to fly from my lips: that in putting the needs of some hapless farmer in Roa ahead of his duties he was forgetting himself, and hardly showing loyalty to his king and his country. But no, it was all recriminations over how worried _I_ had been. Fishwife, indeed. I rolled my eyes at myself and lifted my coffee to my lips.

I heard Costis's step a moment before the door opened behind me. He came to stand at my shoulder, inhaling deeply. "None for me?" He asked, speaking of my coffee.

"I did not expect you awake so early."

He rolled his head from side to side. "I didn't sleep well."

Neither had I. I had drawn the curtain between our beds and then spent a great deal of the night listening to the evidence that he was as restless as I. 

I half turned to him, offering my cup. He shook his head. "I don't want to take yours, Kamet."

I huffed. That wretched letter that he'd written to his friend Aristogiton, and his claim that I played the part of a slave to him. I wish I hadn't read the cursed thing, I wish I hadn't had to, but I know very well how much ordinary people can reveal with a word, even when they think they're being sly.

"What?" Costis asked, watching me closely.

"May I not offer to share what is mine, and make my offering with both hands and my whole heart?"

Instead of taking the cup from me, he put his hands over mine, and we both lifted it to his lips. His eyes did not leave mine

"Kamet." He breathed my name out quietly. I could only look up at him, not trusting my voice. "Kamet. May I kiss you?"

"Oh," I said, more an exhalation of breath than a word. "Yes."

With our hands still folded together over the cup we held between us, my Costis bent his head and touched his lips first to my forehead, then to one cheek and then the other, and finally, as I trembled, to my lips. 

"Oh," I said again, and we nearly dropped the cup as we reached for each other.

 

The path from sharing a kiss at dawn to sharing a bed at night was not as smooth as the poets might lead you to believe.

As the pre-dawn stillness gave way to the noises of the village waking around us, Costis caught my wrists in his hands, murmuring, "Kamet, Kamet," pressing his forehead against mine with a look almost of pain in the taut lines of his face. "Kamet, we can't, I have to go, I have to go to the lookouts…"

And he did go. I watched him walk away, the back of his neck as red as a flame, and when he turned to look back at me his cheeks were suffused with a blush that transformed his features and sent me fleeing to my work in the temple to do gods-know-what damage to the scroll I was copying.

Later in that first day, after we had each returned, we stood on opposite sides of our small room looking at each other, until Costis diffused the strange awkwardness by crossing to me and brushing his knuckles across my cheek. He repeated the gesture with his open hand, and I shivered to feel again how effortlessly he could encompass me. His palm cradled my head easily; his hand closed around the largest part of my arm. I had to tip my head back to look up at him, but he did not make me reach for him, he brought himself down to me.

Sometime after that – after I worked his shirt free from his trousers and pressed my hands to the bare skin at the small of his back, after I pulled him close so that his groin pressed against my hip, after he groaned into my mouth and tightened his hold on me, but before either of us made any move towards the curtains at the back of the room – he caught his breath just enough to tell me, haltingly, that within the ranks of the Attolian army certain relations between men were quite common.

I knew this, of course, surely all the world is aware of their customs. When I tried to ask why he was acting so embarrassed if it was as common as he said, he told me that he had been promoted quite young to the Queen's Guard where the practice was not allowed, and so while he had heard all the talk of what it was men might do to give pleasure to one another, he'd never put any of it to the test. When I still looked at him without comprehension, he blushed and stammered until at last I understood: he was embarrassed to tell me that he did not know what he was doing because he thought that I _did._ Gods in their temples, he still believed that I had been the plaything of my former master.

To speak of Nahuseresh and my old life at such a time doused the fire that had been kindled in me the moment his lips touched mine at dawn. I moved away from him, my face hot while I gave him to understand just how wrong he was, my chest swelling with indignation with every word that I spoke because I could see that he did not believe me. I went on until I was nearly shouting, "I was his property, yes, but he never did anything to me that was outside the bounds of decorum!"

"Except to beat you senseless at his whim!" I was shaking my head frantically but Costis only continued, even louder than I had been. "Kamet! You told me that he beat you and then you told me that he was kind!"

"He was kind!" I exploded, and Costis flinched. "Perhaps that was his greatest cruelty, that he could be so kind. At his whim, as you say. At his whim." Deflating, I could only repeat myself in a whisper.

"Kamet –" Costis started towards me, but I held up a hand. He stopped out of reach.

"You do not understand." I said, speaking to his boots. "I thank the gods that you do not understand, but it is not my duty to make you understand, Costis. It was…it was…"

"Complicated?" He offered the word hesitantly.

I looked up at him and nodded as I echoed him. "Complicated. But it is over."

Costis bowed his head, as though burdened by a great weight. A moment later he rolled his shoulders and looked up at me, opening his mouth to ask, of all things, "Would you like me to make something to eat?"

I do not know why nor do I care but that was all the inducement I needed to push myself away from where I had been gripping the back of my desk chair and attach myself to Costis instead.

He stumbled back a step, but then he caught me up in his arms and the fire blazed again.

 

"Kamet. Wake up."

I didn't want to wake up. I wanted to drift on this cloud forever, rocked by the gentle echoes of sensations whose names arrived to me slowly, unfurling like flowers in the sun. I had never felt so wonderful.

"Kamet." His nose nudged my cheek, his lips were on my ear, his voice resonated with the thrumming of blood through my body. "Kamet."

"Costis?" I turned my head, seeking his mouth.

"No," he said, chuckling against my lips. "Ennikar."

My eyes flew open, and Costis threw back his head, laughing out loud. I pushed at his shoulder, laughing too. He tried both to reach for me and duck away from me and, perhaps forgetting we were in my smaller bed, he rolled off of it to land on the floor in a sprawl. I followed, intentionally, but just as graceless.

 

It is an ongoing mystery, a delightful one, that Costis finds me attractive. As for me, now that I am free to look, I find it difficult at times to take my eyes from him. He caught me watching him one morning and laughed aloud – he laughs every day now, and nearly always has a smile on his lips. Both are beguiling – and said that he must write soon and thank his king for the gift of the eye-glasses. I scowled at him, and have been pointedly taking them off whenever he comes into the room. It makes him laugh even more before, usually, coming over to kiss me.

We were in the market one afternoon when a sudden rainstorm caught us by surprise. I had to dash across the square to join him where he had, luckily for him, already been standing under the shelter of a cloth merchant's stall. Shaking myself off, I removed my glasses and searched for a dry bit of my shirt to clean them on. Wordlessly, Costis took them from me and wiped them with his own shirt, then lifted them to his eyes, peering curiously through them and wincing.

"Gods all, Kamet. It's like trying to see underwater."

I glared at him and tried to recover them, but he lifted them out of my reach before, once again, holding them to his eyes and squinting at me.

"And here I thought there must be magic in the glass," he said in a low voice as he took them off, cradling them carefully in his hands. "To make you look at me the way you do. It's the only way I've been able to account for it."

"Here," I said, holding out my hand. "You'll ruin your own eyes and then what a useless pair of idiots we'll be."

Costis snorted and handed them back to me, his hand lingering at my elbow as I put them back on.

"Well," I said. The rain was already abating and I busied myself with checking that my bag had not been soaked through. "Even if there is magic in them it still leaves the matter of the way you look at me quite unaccountable."

"You, Kamet?" Costis said, clearly surprised. Rocking back on his heels, he slowly shook his head, eyes fixed on mine even as he extended a hand in a sweeping motion that encompassed me from my hair to my sandals. "Look at you."

I blushed. "You'd have me like Oleander, and fall in love with the sight of my own face?" I blushed deeper, realising what I had just said, and knocked my elbow against his with a muttered, "Idiot," as I turned away. It was neither the time nor the place for the kind of look that he was giving me, and as soon as the threat of rain seemed to have passed, we made our way home.

 

"I was falling in love with you with every step we took towards Attolia. Idiot."

"Oh. Why?" My chest was still heaving, but I had begun to recover my senses. I could hear in his voice the echo of our earlier conversation in the marketplace, and my own clumsy attempt to misdirect him with an ill-timed insult.

"'Why?'" He rolled his eyes at me, his exasperation at odds with the way he pulled me closer. "If anyone could say 'why' would we have as many gods-awful long plays and songs about love as we do?"

"Oh. Right." It left me breathless that he could speak of it so casually, as if this did not change the very fabric of the earth beneath my feet. And then I was breathless purely because of what he was doing with his hands. "Why," I asked again, wanting to shout at myself to stop talking, "why didn't you say anything?"

He looked up at me, and I wanted to shout at him not to stop what he was doing.

"Well. I didn't know, did I?" he asked, unexpectedly serious. I fought against my hazy vision to see his face, but he ducked his head just then and kissed my belly, then the crease of my hip, humming softly. "What I was telling you, that day…about the, the way things are in the...back home…"

"What you were telling me about the lofty ways of the Attolians?" I teased, hoping that we were not about to venture back into uncertain territories.

"Yes." I felt his smile against my skin. Gods help me, I could have had him again already. Gods help me, he could read my body as skilfully as he had ever read my mind. Barely had I blinked but he was off the bed and kneeling on the floor, pulling me to him with his hands behind my knees. I managed to push myself up on my elbows before he took me into his mouth and I collapsed, gasping, back into the sheets.

 

I am beginning to think that Costis cannot draw breath without using it to give me pleasure.

 

I am ashamed to say that I had been slow to return the favour.

Our shared excuse of inexperience fell away the first time we fell into bed. The things I knew how to do were meant to give a very different kind of pleasure, but we quickly discovered that it is easy indeed to follow the guiding light of passion and were soon putting our hands and mouths to good use with no hesitation. But where Costis has continued to outshine me is in the moments between. I gaze at him from across the room. He crosses the room and settles his hand on the back of my neck.

But as we lay in our bed on that rainy afternoon, after he had reduced me to my basest parts before which he had told me that he loved me, I turned to him and saw myself reflected in his eyes. More than that, I could see for a moment what I must look like through those eyes: looking but not touching, desiring but not taking.

I placed my hand in the centre of his chest, looking down at him. His face and neck were flushed, his skin shone with sweat and his eyes were so bright, their unfathomable depths holding a measure of love and desire and trust that seemed impossible to such a one as me. He had one leg crooked up under the other and one arm resting on the bed, palm up. _I trust you_ , he may as well have written the words in ink across every part of him. As though I were the one with enough power in my body to carry him, to protect him, to keep the two of us safe.

I let my eyes follow my hands, roaming over his body, exploring and claiming as he had done to me already many times. Discovering anew the map of scars across his skin, returning again and again to one spot above his hip that made him squirm and give voice to soft, involuntary gasps.

"Will you let me say what I was going to say?" He asked at last, when I had stilled with my cheek pressed over his thundering heart, my hand wrapped around his wrist, palm to pulse.

I tried to tell him that he was an idiot to think that I would let him speak, now that I knew what better use he could put his mouth to. He responded by reaching down and swiping his thumb under my eye, once and then again, burying his hand in my hair as I rolled my head to hide my face in his chest.

"In Attolia – In Attolia's army…" he began, and then amended, and then trailed off. I sniffed and raised myself up to look at him. He'd turned his head to face the door that would usually by this time be opened wide to admit the sunset and, I realised suddenly, the imagined view to what lay beyond it. Beyond the opened door was the sea and the mountains and the plains, and beyond all of that lay his home. He took in a deep breath, held it, and when he let it out, seemed to changed course. "I didn't say anything before for any number of reasons. Even if I had realised, while we were on the road and in danger and I was under orders to bring you safely to my king…"

Costis shook his head slowly, and raised one shoulder, all without looking at me. "I don't know, Kamet. The only thing I do know is that I _didn't_ know until that moment in the harbour, when I thought I had lost everything that I thought we had."

 _I thought we were Immakuk and Ennikar,_ he had said, as Attolia's warships raced to shatter that illusion.

He continued speaking with his face turned away, coming back to his point at last and telling me that in his home he had only before seen this kind of relationship within a very specific context and had never thought that it could exist outside of those bonds. "But when I found out that you had deceived me, what I felt…" He shook his head again, eyes closing.

"Immakuk and Ennikar were lovers," I told him. He lay still beneath me. "The stories make little of it, because it is simply understood to be the truth. To be the great truth that underlies their every deed."

Costis opened his eyes, and turning his head away from the door, he looked up at me.

"Great was their love," Costis said, quiet, quoting from the first tablet. "And greatly did it sustain them in their journeys together."

I felt as though my heart might burst, so full was I of love and of something yet more foreign to me than love: of an old hunger deeply satisfied, of a long yearning finally quietened.

"What have you learned?" Costis was still murmuring, recalling lines from the first story I had ever told him, half the world away from where we now lay.

"Learned about blessings accepted and blessings deserved, wandered lonely until Shesmegah took pity," I answered him. My eyes were brimming again, and Costis held my face between his hands.

"Wander with me then, friend Kamet."

As he had done, that first day, I ducked my head and kissed his brow, his cheeks, and then touched my lips to his.

"Is that a so, then?" he asked, reaching for my hand.

I nodded as he kissed my palm. And so it was.

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoy my writing, I'd be thrilled if you'd take a minute to check out my original fiction. My first novel, 'Portrait of a Stranger,' is a sweet story of three chance encounters, two boys, and first love. Co-written with my fic-writing partner stardust_made, it will be released on December 26, 2018. You can order it [HERE](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KVLWHF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1543166018&sr=1-1&keywords=Portrait+of+a+Stranger).
> 
> The first few chapters are available to read [here on our blog](https://leboncanon.wordpress.com/). We appreciate the support of our fellow fanpeople!


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